Some more photos from Uganda posted

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Binderclip Camera

The Uganda gallery has a few more pictures uploaded upon arrival in Arusha, Tanzania, including images from Masaka, Gulu, Apac and Mbale. The child above watched the photography lesson Moses gave to a group of young mothers in one of the IDP camps in Gulu. He improvised his own camera and mimed the taking of photographs throughout the afternoon, which reminded me of a story Eduardo Galeano told at book reading of a boy who proudly showed him the watch he’d drawn on his wrist. 

We’ve just returned from Endulan Hospital which serves the 77,000 Masai who live in the nature reserve surrounding the Ngorongoro crater. Endulan Hospital itself is a small outpost with about 50 staff with about 72 beds. Much more on that later…

Water in Africa

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Woman collecting water in Apac

I took this photo of a woman we met in Apac who was on her way to fill her plastic jerry cans with water from a public pump from one of the town’s wells. One of the ongoing subjects Moses has been documenting during our trip is how water is used by people in East Africa. He’s gathering images for an organization called Clearwater Initiative which works on water issues here. Every town has at least one public well with a pump from which people collect water for drinking and often washing clothes as well. We didn’t have a way to test the quality of this water so we purified it with my Steripen or iodine before we drank it ourselves.

In addition to the public pumps, many buildings here include systems for catching and storing rainwater from their gutters on the roof. This water is usually only used for washing.

The paradox of progress

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Uumar inspecting broken power supply.

A few days ago in Apac the power was out, so Moses plugged his MacBook Pro into a petrol powered generator. With a snap and a spark which left an acrid burned plastic odor, his power brick was suddenly non-functional. We did some research by phone and internet to discover that the only places where we might find a replacement are the capital cities of Kampala, Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Kampala was a six hour drive in the wrong direction, and we aren’t due in Nairobi for a few more days.

So yesterday, here in Mbale, I found a man named Uumar at the U&A Electrical and Electronics shop. He and his partner Abdul repair mobile phones, boom boxes, televisions and all sorts of other devices. Their small workshop is festooned with broken electronic equipment from which they scavange parts. Uumar examined the broken power brick and after I assured him that it was OK if he broke it while taking it apart, he got to work with a hacksaw blade and a screwdriver.

In the end he established that a capacitor and a few transistors had blown. He had to ask around town in various places before he could find replacement parts. But within about an hour and half he’d tracked down what we needed and soldered everything in place. We carefully tested the output with a voltage meter before he superglued the case back together. Then I plugged the repaired brick into the MacBook and the LED glowed green, and the computer was charging again.

All this cost 38,000 Ugandan shillings: less than 20 US dollars. More than half was for the parts he had to buy from other people in town. His labor fee was about five dollars. As my friend Gerry Lusk commented on Facebook, in the US it would be difficult to find anyone capable or willing to do the job. And if you did find such a person, the labor charge would probably exceed the $80 cost of replacing the unit.

Uganda Photos!

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Finally I’ve successfully posted a batch of photos to my gallery documenting our first week in Uganda.

Sub-galleries include:

A couple of short videos I shot while riding on the back of one of the boda boda scooter taxis with Moses can be viewed over on http://djiboutiorbust.blogspot.com/

Earthrise

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Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968.

NASA’s image of the day shows the first photograph of an earthrise. Did anyone ever imagine an earthrise before this picture illustrated it? Astronaut Bill Anders exposed this photo during the Apollo 8 mission 40 years ago today. From this photograph Oliver Morton begins a thoughtful contemplation of life and our planet:

That the Earth is small is undeniable. If the inner solar system were the size of the United States, the Earth would be the size of a football field; if the distance to the center of the galaxy were a mile, the Earth would be less than an atom. But if the “Earthrise” photo could have captured our planet in the dimension of time instead of space, things would look different. In its duration, as opposed to its diameter, the Earth demands to be measured on a cosmic scale. At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter’s night are younger than the planet beneath your feet.

Work globally, attend locally

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Two weeks ago, before flying to Vienna for a week of work, I saw the premiere of “The Eight: Reindeer Monologs” written by Jeff Goode and directed by my friend Vic Chaney. It’s a tiny production at the Exit Theatre. But it’s fantastically well acted and directed from a hilarious script involving Santa and his reindeer in an North Pole workshop sex scandal. If you read this before December 20, try to get tickets and go see it. You will not be disappointed.

A couple of days after I got back from Vienna, napping Wednesday afternoon from jet lag, Deb called to see if I’d join her and some friends for an evening of storytelling. It turned out to be this month’s installment of the Porch Light Storytelling Series whose theme was “all that glitters is not gold.” What a pleasure it was to sit with an audience of a few hundred San Franciscans listening to people get up and spend ten minutes telling touching, funny stories. The setting was the Verdi Club, which is this quaint old italian social hall which can be rented out for weddings and (apparently) storytelling events.

Willow Willow singing \

There’s a tiny stage like you used to have in your grammar school auditorium. The lighting is terrible. But the voices are clear. The stories are wonderful and the organizers Arlene and Beth make everyone feel even more at home than Ira Glass does his guests on This American Life. There were live musical interludes to keep the evening moving including a heartbreaking rendition of Christmas Time from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special by a duo called Willow Willow.

And last night I went to Caffe Triest in Berkeley to see my friend Sonia Caltvedt play with Brian Wood’s jazz band. Live music should be a part of everyone’s week. More pictures from that night are in the gallery…

Some work endures…

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EcoTimber LogoMaria McLaughlin emailed me an article from today’s Chronicle about EcoTimber. Nice to see the logo I designed sixteen years ago remains basically the same. So much of my work is completely ephemeral: a presentation that gets seen onscreen for one live event and then is forgotten forever. The EcoTimber brand has outlasted the participation of the company founders. I’m also glad that Jason, Aaron and Eugene went with EcoTimber rather than “Arbus.”

EcoTimber sources sustainably harvested woods for floors, in case you know of anyone remodeling a house…